"Come on; let me ride you around the block, then." "If--if you like my company so much, can't you just take a walk with me or come out and sit on our steps awhile?" "Lord, girl, Flamm Avenue is hot enough to fry my soul to-night!" "We can't all have fathers that live in thirty-room houses out in Kingsmoreland Place." "Thank God for that! I sneaked home this morning to change my clothes, and thought maybe I'd got into somebody's mausoleum by mistake." "Was--was your papa around, Charley?" "In the library, shut up with old man Brookes." "Did he--did he see the morning papers? You know what he said last time, Charley, when the motor-cycle cop chased you down an embankment." "Honey, if my old man was to carry out every threat he utters, I'd be disinherited, murdered, hong-konged, shanghaied, and cremated every day in the year." "I got to go now, Charley." "Not let a fellow even spin you home?" "You know I want to, Charley, but--but it don't do you any good, boy, being seen with me in that joy-wagon of yours. It--it don't do you any good, Charley, ever--ever being seen with me." "There's nothing or nobody in this town can hurt my reputation, honey, and certainly not my ace-spot girl. Turn your mind over, and telephone down for me to come out and pick you up about eight." "Don't hit it up to-night, Charley. Can't you go home one evening?" He juggled her arm. "You're a nice little girl, all righty." "There's my car." He elevated her by the elbow to the step, swinging up half-way after her to drop a coin into the box. "Take care of this little lady there, conductor, and don't let your car skid." "Oh, Charley--silly!" She forced her way into the jammed rear platform, the sharp brim of the red sailor creating an area for her. "S'long, Charley!" "S'long, girl!" Wedged there in the moist-faced crowd, she looked after him, at his broad back receding. An inclination to cry pressed at her eyeballs. Flamm Avenue, which is treeless and built up for its entire length with two-story, flat-roofed buildings, stares, window for window, stoop for stoop, at its opposite side, and, in summer, the strip of asphalt street, unshaded and lying naked to the sun, gives off such an effluvium of heat and hot tar that the windows are closed to it and night descends like a gas-mask to the face. Opening the door upon the Hassiebrock front room, convertible from bed- to sitting-room by the mere erect-position-stand of the folding-bed, a wave of this tarry heat came flowing out, gaseous, sickening. Miss Hassiebrock entered with her face wry, made a diagonal cut of the room, side-stepping a patent rocker and a table laid out with knickknacks on a lace mat, slammed closed two windows, and, turning inward, lifted off her hat, which left a brand across her forehead and had plastered down her hair in damp scallops. "Whew!" "Lo-o, that you?" "Yes, ma." "Come out to your supper. I'll warm up the kohlrabi."